Hello, Insiders.
David here.
A few weeks ago, we put out a survey asking you to speak your brains, and speak you did!
We received many varied responses, but one thing that kept coming up was that you wanted to know more about the authors of Uncanny Kingdom.
Aw, shucks!
Okay, here goes. I’ll start by saying that Matt and I have been writing together for years. Originally, long before we created the Uncanny Kingdom, we met on a comedy writing forum. This was way back when MySpace was a thing. Yeah. Looooong ago.
Anyway, I liked the cut of his jib and suggested we work together. And so we did, for some time. Between us, we got a couple of sketch show pilots commissioned, won some awards, did a few years of stand-up, and got hired as writing staff for the aborted fifth season of The IT Crowd. But neither of us ever quite broke through… at least not in a way that regularly paid the rent.
Then, one day, we realised we weren’t writing comedy sketches at all anymore, but were separately working on novels about magic and monsters set in modern-day London. The rest, as they say, is history…
But what about that comedy stuff we made? There’s a lot of it. A lot. Some of its very slick and features some big comedy names (big in the UK, anyway). Some of it is plain bad. But if there’s one piece I still remember fondly, it’s the sketch below. Even better, it features both of us as performers, so you can finally get a good look at the men hiding behind the laptops (that’s if you haven’t already Googled us, ya filthy perverts!).
Go ahead and give it a squiz, but first a few background notes:
- We made a decision to shoot the sketch in an artsy, experimental way, hence it being assembled from spliced-together stills (I think I watched La Jetée and wondered if I could make that technique work for comedy, pretentious arsehole that I am).
- Who is this Paul Daniels you speak of? Just think of him as Britain’s answer to David Copperfield. An incredibly low-rent, now-dead David Copperfield.
- The behind-the-camera photographer for this was Jayde Adams, a brilliant performer who actually ended up making it very big in comedy.
- Yes, that is my real torso. Quit bugging me about it!
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